brand-as-business bit:  last week Best Buy‘s new CEO Hubert Joly met with analysts and journalists to share his plan to turnaround the struggling electronics chain (you can check out a debrief of his presentation from Businessweek). His plan features several smart moves — the highlights: expanding Best Buy’s private-label business, which includes the Insignia and Rocketfish brands […]

brand-as-business bit:  Hindsight is 20/20. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history books of failed brands.  Julian Day, RadioShack’s former Chairman-CEO, probably has a few regrets.  Although Day has been out of RadioShack’s hot seat for a year, his leadership marked the beginning of the brand’s demise. With Best Buy fighting for its […]

(Welcome to a Brand Experience Brief — insights and analysis from my audit of a new and interesting retail or restaurant concept.) Walgreens is trying to “transform from a traditional drugstore to a retail health and daily living destination,” according to Joe Magnacca, the company’s president of daily living products and solutions.  Its flagship stores showcase its new […]

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Now that summer is officially here, I wanted to take a look back at the past 6 months and see what kinds of conversations had been sparked by brand-as-business bites. The following are the top posts from each month in terms of number of re-tweets, comments, or emails they generated – I’ve also included some […]

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I’m working on two big and juicy brand repositioning projects.  While both involve quite significant departures from the companies’ current strategies and it’s still pretty early on in the projects, it’s likely one is going to be successful and the other, not, or at least less so. I thought the reason for the difference between […]

Knight

To marketers in despair, a rebrand may be like a knight in shining armor. How better to re-awaken the passion for a brand than to create a new name and image?! Despite the promise of a fairy tale ending, more rebrands fail than succeed.  Executing a rebrand is fraught with challenges and requires some rather […]